Facebook Emphasizes Status in Newsfeed
Posted by Nick O'Neill on August 28th, 2008 11:30 AM
If you are more interested in what your friends are up to then what photos they are uploading and what their relationship status, you may be pleased to hear that Facebook has upgraded your friends’ statuses. Now rather than just showing recent friend activities, the most recent status updates of your friends are now displayed at the top of the news feed.
It’s clear that statuses have become one of the most important components of Facebook and many have called it a Twitter killer. I wouldn’t be surprised to see an increasing emphasis on statuses as Facebook moves forward. One interesting component about this new layout is how the statuses are updated instantaneously whereas the main news feed content is only updated periodically.
This contrasts FriendFeed where every load of the page presents new data among your friends as the site is updated in real-time. Facebook has tried to automatically filter information for users to try to select the most relevant information. It will be interesting to see if Facebook ever shifts this strategy to display more information.
This is a simple change but it most definitely highlights the importance of statuses in Facebook.
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August 28th, 2008 at 11:45 am
I am new to your blog, so maybe you mentioned this in previous entries, but what I believe made the statutes so important was adding the ability to comment on other's statues. I noticed people started commenting on mine and it created a viral response rate - I see others commenting on others a lot lately.
I would not consider this a twitter killer necessarily, it might just augment twitter. People are not ditching twitter to use fb status only, instead they are streaming twitter into their status. Furthermore, I keep my twitter status separate from FB as to separate my networking and others I believe consider the same. This is important for those whose twitter streams are specific to an industry topic or other relevancies not necessarily meant to share on FB. Just some thoughts..
September 8th, 2008 at 10:31 am
Pity they've taken away the RSS feed for statuses with the new.facebook.com… That would be killer - adding your current Facebook status to your blog / website etc…